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Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs) are an important pathway and governance system for area-based conservation led by Indigenous Peoples. While IPCAs have been established across rural and northern regions of Canada, they have received little attention in urbanized landscapes, even though all of Canada's urban areas coincide with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis territory (and thereby underlying Indigenous jurisdiction) and the majority of Indigenous Peoples in the country live in urban centers. Canada's federal government is in the process of establishing six new urban national parks and has committed to working with local Indigenous governments and organizations in parks planning. This study examined the potential for strengthening Indigenous participation in urban parks planning, governance, and management, including the establishment of new urban Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (UIPCAs). The results of spatial analyses of urban Indigenous territory, a review of relevant domestic and international policy and interviews with local Indigenous conservation leaders illuminate the potential for new forms of urban conservation governance that are grounded in Indigenous rights and responsibilities and reflective of Indigenous knowledge systems and biocultural priorities. However, it remains to be seen how urban Indigenous-led conservation, such as UIPCAs, can fit and operate within proposed government urban conservation initiatives, such as Canada's Urban National Parks Program, which do not currently foreground Indigenous-led conservation in the governance of urban green space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crown governments, the conservation sector, academics, and some Indigenous governments, communities, and organizations are framing Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)--a newly recognized form of Indigenous-led conservation in Canada--as advancing reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. Yet it is often unclear what is being, or could be, reconciled through IPCAs. While highly diverse, IPCAs are advanced by Indigenous Nations, governments, and communities who protect them, with or without partners, according to their Indigenous knowledge, legal, and governance systems. IPCAs may be expressions of "generative refusal," visions of Indigenous futures, and commitments to uphold responsibilities to the lands, waters, and past and future generations. IPCAs refuse settler colonial ontologies including the expectation of ongoing white settler privilege, which relies on the continued appropriation of lands and resources. By examining the practical, relational, and systemic challenges Indigenous Nations advancing IPCAs encounter, we discuss opportunities for Crown governments and the conservation sector to cultivate decolonial responses. Indigenous Nations advancing IPCAs may face challenges with resource extraction, laws and legislation, financing, relationships and capacity, and jurisdiction and governance. We contend that IPCAs could be pathways of reconciliation if Crown governments and the conservation sector support IPCAs in ways consistent with the recommendations of Indigenous leaders. This requires dismantling the roadblocks arising fromsettler ontologies and institutions that impede IPCA establishment and ongoing stewardship. Thus, not only could Indigenous futures be advanced, we might also cultivate decolonial futures in which all peoples and species can thrive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States have long used protected areas to consolidate control over Indigenous Peoples' territories, undermining community-based governance and access to resources. Despite this history, Indigenous Peoples around the world are increasingly designating their own protected areas to defend ancestral territories and assert self-determination. This paper examines Indigenous conservation politics in the Salween Peace Park in Kawthoolei, an autonomous territory of the Karen (Sino-Tibetan language-speaking peoples living primarily in Burma and along the Thai-Burma border). Local villagers and the Karen National Union envision the park as a grassroots initiative for peace in an area that has suffered decades of armed conflict between the Burmese military and the Karen movement for self-determination. Using the Salween Peace Park as a case study, we engage Indigenous scholarship on politics of recognition, resurgence, and refusal. We explore intersections and tensions between these political strategies, highlighting ways that Indigenous protected areas mobilize different forms of power to advance self-determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to scholarly debates about the role of conservation in the reproduction of capitalist social relations with a case study on marine protected areas in the Canadian Arctic. Unlike historic parks in Canada, and modern parks in the Global South, new parks and protected areas in Canada are not cases of 'primitive accumulation' or 'accumulation by dispossession'. Drawing on Gramscian historical materialism, we argue that their relationship to capital accumulation is primarily one of legitimization. Protected areas play a complex and contradictory role in the reproduction of capitalism in northern Canada. Because they protect important wildlife habitat and hunting grounds from extraction, and insofar as they usually entail support for fishing and hunting practices, the establishment of new protected areas can help reproduce Indigenous hunting and fishing economies. They therefore help maintain the conditions of possibility for a future anti-capitalist and decolonial social transformation. Moreover, because protected areas remove land from extractive capital's sphere of activity, their establishment entails real material concessions to Indigenous communities from extractive capital. However, in the absence of a clearly articulated program for a broader social transformation, these concessions help create the conditions for Indigenous peoples to consent to an economy based on extraction and are therefore fundamental to the hegemony of extractive capital in Northern Canada. Thus, protected areas are part of an unstable equilibrium of compromises that extractive hegemony is premised on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The voluntary resettlement of people from national parks has emerged as a potential solution to long entrenched people-park conflicts. Yet critical examination of its associated policy and practice is rare. After identifying a trend toward voluntary resettlement in policy and practice, this article examines a resettlement project at Cat Tien National Park in Vietnam. An analysis of the agreement and negotiation processes with local communities reveals that genuine efforts and organizational commitments to voluntary resettlement can take on qualities associated with forced relocations. The Cat Tien National Park Conservation Project, supported by a major international conservation organization, operated on a principle of voluntary agreements while also applying international resettlement standards based on the World Bank's safeguard policies for involuntary resettlement. This apparent confusion in policy was further reflected in practice with the safeguard policies perversely reinforcing, rather than alleviating, involuntary aspects of the project. This article recognizes the potential of voluntary resettlement as an equitable conservation tool, but warns against applying it as an inconspicuous solution to the problems generally associated with involuntary resettlement. Distinctions between voluntary and involuntary resettlement are ambiguous at best; resettlement policy and guidelines need to reflect and clarify this ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]